Telephone communications cable consists of an outer sheath covering twenty-five pairs of insulated, color-coded wires. Each pair of wires is twisted to reduce cross talk. Lengths of cable are assembled with a male electrical connector half at one end and a female connector half at the other end to facilitate plugging into a communications apparatus or splicing the lengths of cable end to end. U.S. Pat. No. 3,760,335 discloses solderless versions of these connector halves. Each connector half includes two rows of contacts having wire-connecting portions. The color-coded wires merely are inserted into these connecting portions to establish electrical connections with the contacts.
Semi-automatic apparatus for trimming and inserting the wires is disclosed in each of U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,995,358 and 4,238,874. An operator of the apparatus must manually select each twisted pair of color-coded wires of the cable and present the same to the apparatus. The presented wires activate a pair of reciprocating inserters which trim the wires and insert the wires into corresponding contacts, one into each of the two rows of contacts. The wires are in a random array within the cable sheath and must be assembled within the proper color-coded positions in the connector half. Therefore, the operator must manually sort the color-coded wires in the proper order before presentation to the apparatus. Manual sorting is time consuming and subject to operator error.
Apparatus which automatically sorts the color-coded wires is described in a paper: Ebrey, Roger G.; Sckerl, Herbert A.; International Wire and Cable Symposium Proceedings 1980, Pages 178-187. A rotating disc has a periphery provided with a notch which is sized to allow entry of a single wire. As the disc rotates, the individual wire is transferred in a circular path past a knife blade which cuts through the wire insulation and makes electrical contact with the conductor portion of the wire. The wire transmits an electrical signal corresponding to its color coding. The knife blade comprises a sensor which identifies the signal. Repeated operation of the disc results in each wire of a cable being identified by the knife blade. Each identified wire is transferred by the disc to a color-coded position on one of two storage racks. When all of the wires are sorted and placed on the racks in the color-coded arrangement, the racks are transferred to a mechanism which trims the wires and inserts them in a connector half, maintaining the appropriate color-coded arrangement.